I had a strange, fascinating dream last night. I found this book, written as a schematic. The sentences formed paths, met at logic gates, and, by following these logic gates, formed paragraphs, pages, chapters, eventually the whole book. The first half of a sentence would lead up to an OR gate, forcing you to choose how it would end, which would dictate the shape the story would take. Plots would intertwine at AND gates; possibilities would be shot down at XOR gates.
Academics such as Umberto Eco speak of books as a machine that creates meaning. Nowhere was this so explicit as the book of my dreams, where the narrative literally became a program, run by the reader, that generates meaning.
2 comments:
Way I see it, you weren't dreaming about a book. You were dreaming about life.
Well, we only get to have XOR gates if we include alternate universes. But yeah, man, I wish I could write the book that I dreamt about. It was wild.
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